In Beijing. Again!

Third time in Beijing in five months! I Stayed at Crowne Plaza near Bird's Nest but I think I like Sheraton Great Wall of China more, it is cozier somehow. I bought a Chinese kitchen knife (one of those with an axeshaped head! All chefs use them in China) at a local grocery store. Visited Silk Market with some colleagues but did not dare to buy electronics. I need an M2 memory card for my mobile and the saleswoman tried to sell me a 4Gb card for 250 yuan; sounds cheap but what do you do if it doesn't work a week later?!

After the seminar the local staff invited us for a sightseeing, very nice. We went to a museum that showed Beijing as a city from the early days up til now. Very interesting. On one of the floors they have built a model of the modern city, in intervalls the main lights in the room are dimmed and thousands of little lamps light up the city. If you took away the smog you would get the same view from an airplane at night!

Model of Beijing

Then we went to a palace close to HoaHai lake, the palace was built the same way as the Forbidden City but ten times smaller and was the home to some powerful person hundreds of years ago. The palace was nice but I liked the garden the most.

The number of animals on the roof slant of a house shows the importance of the owner. The highest number of animals on a house is eleven and the only house that has that many is a house in the Forbidden City.

The likeable garden.

Then we took a bikeride in the hutong. Hutongs are the old (poor?) neighbourhoods in Beijing, many low residencials made out of concrete, cramped together. Sometimes the streets become so narrow it is hard for the traffic to pass. This is not a biggie for the bikeriders though who scream and shout at everything and hardly ever stop. We paid 200 yuan for a rider to carry two of us in each cart. Me and a colleague built like myself sat down in a cart but the rider just shook his head and we understood he thought we weighed too much together, hehe. Henrik went to sit in another cart and my lightweighted colleage Sarah joined me instead.

After all these activities we were hungry and dinner was eaten in a small restaurant in the hutong, across the main street of HoaHai Lake. Very cool. Not all food was good for a "Westerner's taste buds" but most of it was great and the atmosphere and the nice conversations made it the highlight of the trip.

Dinner in a hutong restaurant

Xie xie to all my new friends in Beijing!